Vodafone snubs Itunes and Nokia Music Store

Not only is Vodafone cocking its snoot at Apple's Itunes store, it is also displaying its reaction to Nokia's recent announcement of its own Nokia Music Store offering.

Rob Lewis, CEO with Omniphone which operates Musicstation for Vodafone, suggested that the service isn't necessarily competing head on with the two rival services.

He pointed out that one of them (Itunes, obviously) concentrates on side loading of music onto handsets. The other (presumably Music Stores) sells music on a track by track basis.

With Musicstation and 3G's HSPA capability, Lewis points out that handset owners can download a complete album in minutes.

At present with Musicstation there's no facility for 'dual downloading' where tracks can be delivered both over the air to a handset and over the net to a PC.

Increasing the speculation that Apple's UK partner is indeed O2, Vodafone ruled itself out as an Iphone supplier at the weekend.

Talking about the Iphone to The Sunday Times, Arun Sarin, Vodafone's CEO, said, "It is a 2G phone, not 3G. When it's a broadband phone we will be interested in carrying it."

So given that Iphone v 2.0 will probably be plain 3G, Vodafone won't be playing ball until Iphone v 3.0 comes out with HSPA.

In the meantime Vodafone UK apparently has an exclusive on the recently announced Nokia N95 8GB. Presumably that handset will actually ship with Nokia's Xpress Music software inside, but Vodafone could choose to leave it out.

Vodafone isn't the first network operator to offer a service based around Omnifone's service. However, the pricing is new. It's £1.99 per week for unlimited downloads.

It's not clear whether the handset owner has to pay for the data connexion or whether it's built into the weekly cost.

Omnifone has, of course, set itself a target of 100 million users in a year. Ten times more than Apple hopes to acquire as Iphone users. µ

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